Wikipedia Thinking Advertising : Google, Yahoo or Who?
Wikipedia may be on its way to profiting via serving online advertising says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to the Times Online. Wales tells The Times “at some point questions are going to be raised over the amount of money we are turning down.”
Sure volunteer “wikitopeans” may go up in arms over the addition of ads to Wikipedia, but companies like Answers.com have been built around republishing Wikipedia content on pages with served advertising, and why shouldn’t Wikipedia benefit a bit more for its efforts? Perhaps a portion of the advertisements going to charity will help the transition Wales ponders “how the charitable mission could be supported by money raised through advertising.”
Tig at Marketing Vox brings up a very strong point that “Wikipedia is ideally suited for online advertising: It now receives around 2.5 billion pageviews per month, and traffic is doubling every four months. It was the ninth-fastest-growing website in 2005, according to Nielsen/Netratings.”
If Wales & company do decide to go paid advertiisng, next question would be, which contextually targeted advertising network do they sign on with; Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network, or possibly a smaller contender like AdBrite? Wouldn’t Wikipedia be quite a coup for a new MSN contextual network!
Should Wikipedia “sell out”? If so, which contextual ad network would you recommend?
I WOULD PREFER MSN SINCE THEY SEEM TO DELIVER BETTER ADS. THEY BASE ADS ON AGE GROUPS, SO A 13RD WOULDN’T SEE AN AD FOR MASTERS DEGREE. THEY SHOULD OPT FOR RSS/XML STYLE ADS WHICH DELIVER CONTENT BASED ADS.
Go Bill… I don’t blame anyone “selling out” a little. Even CList charges for some jobs ads….
The wiki was built by a a core of hired guides, I am quite sure the scope is commercial and yes MSN i love it but how does it fit Microsoft own encyclopedia.
Wikipedia NOT Thinking Advertising now…
Please read updates from Jimmy Wales user talk page
Say it ain’t so, Jimbo!, Advertising is not what there is on his mind now.
Since when is throwing an ad-banner on a webpage “selling out?” I may be one of the growing few with this opinion, but it’s not like the Wikipedia founder can just stash the cash generated from ads anyway. Wakeup, skeptics–has anybody forgotten that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization?
Even without the understanding of what Wikipedia’s non-profit nature represents, there’s still a worthwhile argument to make about advertising in wikipedia: Unless wikipedia penny&dollar contributors are willing to keep up with & reach beyond the pace of expenses that it costs to run this great encyclopedia, “Jimbo” has to face reality–whether skeptical Wikitopeans want it or not. If donations don’t suffice, Wikipedia will fall.. unless there is another better means of finding revenue to keep it’s blood flowing.
As a *heavy* wikipedia user and small-time contributor myself, I personally wouldn’t mind an unobtrusive adspace on wikipedia. If the advertising system provides relevant ads to the Wiki content–rather than some annoyingly ridiculous ’shoot the monkey, win a free iPod’ brainless banner, then nothing is lost in Wikipedia’s compromise for survival and thriving. The knowledge is still free (in every sense of the word), and the founding organization will not only have enough revenue to keep Wikipedia going, they’ll have enough to make it even better (expanding Wikimedia & other projects).
2) Sorry for forgetting to add my second point.. but uh if I remember correctly Jimmy Wales assured people on Wikipedia that it would never run ads. If you say something and do something else, you are a hypocrite – plain and simple
I approve of ads. I am not sure about U.S. users, but accessing Wikipedia from Japan takes a long time and often returns error messages. Any company needs money to grow and provide better services. If ads means that I can get faster access due to upgraded servers, then they have my vote.
I heard that a company is offering a technology similar to Google Adsense and Adword but on a private label basis, meaning that the owner of the platform manage and control the advertisers (content of ads, pricing…)..why Wikipedia would not take that opportunity to recruit its advertisers with its own “business” rules ? The company name is http://www.ads-click.com. What would be better for an non profit organisation than being independent from big money maker ?
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